CHARM OF THE CHOCOLATE

Otago Witness, Issue 3775, 20 July 1926, Page 6

CHARM OF THE CHOCOLATE

the LOVER’S INSPIRATION. Let us weep for the bow and quiver, full of arrows that the sportive God of Love wag wont to carry in the days gone by. Cupid wields now a weapon more subtle by far. He has acquired the wisdom of the years, has Cupid, and he realises that in tbe darkness of a picture show the arrow is prone to fly astray and strike an already married person by mistake. There is trouble enough in the world without that, reflected this sprightly, son of Venus. Wherefore he sat down to devise a weapon more in keeping with the times. \nd so the chocolate was born —the wily, subtle chocolate, clad in an intriguing armour of coloured tinfoil, and surrounded by two or three dozen others, each sitting snugly in a crinkly paper saucer, and the whole lot lying in immaculate rows in a gorgeously ornate box with a picture of the Girl of the Golden West, Mary Bickford, or “Friends” on the lid. "That,” thought Cupid, as lie gazed proudly at his handiwork, “that is the inspiration of the century. Mars can have these old arrows. I’il slip 'em in his quiver when he’3 not looking.” And with that he went away chuckling. It must be admitted that his idea was highly successful. The box of chocolates is to-day the appeal supreme in all youthiul affairs of the heart. The chocolate, properly presented, is a charm of unsurpassed potency. Just a morsel of sweetness, it cements affection in a wonderful way. The evolution, perhaps, of the stick of toffee that the man of nine years offers to the woman of eight to show that there is no ill-feeling. It is irresistible, and well the young man knows it. What is inside that alluring brown coating? Is it hard centre or a soft? Is it a nut, a date, is it jelly, or is it Bulgarian rock? There is no telling except by the delightful experience of taste. And with the aid of a beautiful, beribboned box of neatly-packed chocolates, in one, two, or three divisions, many a lad has won his lass. It would be a pity to think that there are any who curse the day they ever bought a box of chocolates. But there is no gainsaying the fact that the box of chocolates helps to kindle the spark, for it is the preliminary token of affection—the first step, so to speak. That the value and utility of the chocolate for this and a few other purposes is realised is proved by the number of great factories the world over that are engaged in the manufacture of confections of this nature. Even in Dunedin hundreds of people find employment in the manufacture of the frivolous sweetmeat. To them, perhaps, it is not frivolous. It is their wherewithal. Curious to see exactly how these sweets were made, a reporter went exploring the other day, and he saw for himself something of the labour and the material that went to make the chocolate. Heath Robinson has his own ideas. He pictures a vast piece of machinery, with furnaces, piston rods, boilers, and wheels, ending ultimately in a long narrow pine down which the tiny finished chocolate falls on to a little square of paper, and is immediately removed to make room for the next. Heath Robinson, however, is not an economist. His ideas are wrong. Chocolates are made on soundly commercial lines, as the inquirer found out. He was first shown a great pile of little brown beans —the cocoa beans which provide the chief ingredient. These, he was told, are heated in big copper kettles until they melt down into a thick brown “chocolatey” liquid that smells good. Sugar is added, and it smells even better. After much stirring the liquid is placed into another roomy receptacle, where it is rolled between a couple of heavy stones and, if it is to be milk chocolate, the milk is added in a dried form. Again it is stirred night and day, for it improves in quality with the stirring, until finally it is ready to be dried, when it emerges from the kettle in a beautiful, lightcoloured, flaky mass that melts to the taste. The room is heavily laden with the scent of chocolate, and it is not an unpleasant scent. In another room are the machines where rows and rows of centres —hard, soft, and brittle —are conveyed by a belt under a thick, slow-moving shower of molten chocolate, and passed through a long wooden chamber where the confections are air-dried. The machinery for wrapping the sweets in their tinfoil covering is a marvellous piece of mechanism that makes short work of each chocolate that passes by, and by comparison the hand wrapping is a slow and laborious process. After that, the chocolates go into other big rooms where they ar«-col-lected in hundreds and thousands and prepared for packing. Here they are all classified according to their quality, their “insides,” and so on. It is all very interesting, and even intriguing, and if the visitor helps himself to an occasional chocolate, who is to say him nay when the vacancy in the ranks is immediately filled by another brown-coated warrior. That is the last step before the packing room, where the confections are enclosed in boxes ranging from sixpence in value up to several pounds, and varying in artistry of design in acordance with the price one cares to pay. There is a good deal of truth in the belief that one pays almost as much for the box as for the contents, but that is all in the game. The box serves just as valuable a purpose as do the chocolates, for unless it is beautiful and attractive it fails to deliver the message—the message that is more eloquent than a pressure of the hand, for that costs nothing, while the chocolates cost —well, anything. A mercenary way of looking at it, perhaps, but after all what else can a young man do to show the object of his regard that he considers her worth a little sacrifice?